FIVE BY FIVE
(C)1999 Alan M. Schwartz
We are lambasted with horrors of a self-immolating Earth burning
under a carbon dioxide Greenhouse lid, fricasseeing all fragile
and endangered species, desiccating wetlands, combusting forests,
and incidentally exterminating five billion oppressed Third World
natives. (A billion First World elite have air conditioning.)
As good a threat as this sounds to Enviro-whiners, Green Sleaze,
and purveyors of the Carbon Tax on Everything, there is a worm in
Eden. There is no evidence for any of it beyond computer models
that can be tweaked to predict your grandpa cackled like a goose.
We need indisputable, renormalized, politically defensible,
Officially true facts! Does anybody want a meaty (in a purely
vegetarian sense) research grant?
Where there is a market you can be certain buyers and sellers
will appear no matter whether an auction block hosts recreational
pharmaceuticals or government regulators eager for debasement.
We join the authors of Review of Geophysics 37(2) 173 (1999) who
divided the Earth into 2592 five-degree by five-degree parcels.
They resurrected the past, seized the present, and divined the
future. Most of the 2592 plops have no coherent historical data
associated with them because nobody perched all over the Pacific
or Arctic Oceans with a thermometer for the past 150 years,
likewise vast swaths of Siberia, China, both Poles, the Andes,
the Tibetan Plateau... No matter. There is ample grant money to
fill in the gaps like a college kid with a tube of toothpaste
fixing an apartment ceiling before moving.
Before we get to the good stuff - 95% confidence levels! - we
pause to look at the historical record (awkward because it is
based on physical documentation). The temperature versus date
curve is nicely out of whack compared to CO2 emissions. Rather
than a smooth jaunt to Greenhouse Hell we behold two broad
plateaus bordered by steep but short ramps. 1860-1940 looks
pretty flat and cool, and we know nobody was burning coal or
gasoline in that period. 1940-1980 is also flat but, wow!, it is
slightly higher in temperature. The urbanization of the First
world and the laying of incredible acreages of hot dry asphalt,
cement, cities, and suburbs over moist farmlands and swamps had
nothing to do with it. First World terrorists were driving
Cadillacs! 1980-present really gets, ah, cooking. Many weather
stations are placed at civilian and military airports, and you
know how lushly coolly forested those places are.
Of 2592 grid squares fully 66 blocks, about 4% of Earth's surface
area, show 95% confidence level average temperature increases
1978-1997. 30 of them are in the middle-of-nowhere ocean where
extrapolation of renormalized satellite data... It is real! 95%
confidence level! We made up the numbers ourselves according to
validated models! A bunch of other blocks sit atop New York City
and other thermoneutral megapolis benchmarks. Looking over the
world map and its salient hot spots, one gets the impression that
the Greenhouse disaster has its pants jammed around its ankles.
This is not to imply that vast and expensive, counterproductive
State-imposed measures have not been instigated. Banishment of
safe, chemically inert freon (chlorofluorocarbon) refrigerants
from the First World and their mandated replacement with "safe"
(acutely toxic, chronically tumorigenic, corrosive, inefficient)
hydrochlorofluorocarbons has made its mark: HCFCs are whoppingly
potent Greenhouse gases. As sanctified Third World China does
its part by leaking more Freon-12 than the whole of the First
World ever did, greenhouse forcing by released HCFCs overshadows
even modeled CO2 effects. Environmentalism proclaims three
unfailing demands: expensive, shoddy, deadly.
Returning to Earth diced into 2592 easy to swallow statistical
samplings, we have a little problem (beyond heteroskedasticity).
CO2 is a symmetric linear non-polar molecule and an inefficient
infrared absorber. A good IR absorber would be a polar, angular
molecule like water vapor. As temperature goes up the air can
carry more water vapor. Water vapor in air is not a few parts-
per-million, it is percentages (parts-per-hundred). Save the
Earth! Drain the oceans, lakes, rivers...! Or at least wrap
them in something natural, like leather.
The fatuous threat of Gaian hot flashes may not be a consequence
of fossil fuel burning at all. It may be provoked and enforced
by reforestation devastating the atmosphere with stupendous
gigatonnages of transpired water vapor sucked from the ground and
expelled by leaves. Clear cut to save the Earth! We note that
some 50% of those 95% confidence levels' historic increases in
temperature occurred over oceans literally dripping with water.
If things like that were factored into computer models, hoo boy
would Mother Earth be in nugatory hot sweat trouble!
More studies are needed.